


An Anthology of Falling

by teikouarc



Category: Ookiku Furikabutte | Big Windup!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-10-27
Updated: 2013-12-22
Packaged: 2017-12-30 14:42:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1019898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/teikouarc/pseuds/teikouarc
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Waking up to a boy you’ve never seen before passed out in your yard is an interesting experience, Abe decides after some thought. Doubly so if said boy happens to have gigantic, obviously broken, white wings attached to his back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

When an angel is born, the first sensation they know is falling. It’s meant to make the child’s wings develop faster than they would under normal circumstances, and the results are usually positive. This first experience sets the stage for the rest of the angel’s life—and instills a fear of falling into each one. It’s a method that has produced successful angels for generations, and it seemed that it wouldn’t ever fail them.

From there, angels grew extraordinarily fast. Their infancy only lasts as long as it takes for them to learn to control their wings. For the slowest, it generally took a week. The fastest could take as little as 12 hours to be flying around and making a mess of things. From there, something in their body gets triggered, and they shoot up into adolescence within months while they attend lessons. The lessons were fairly simple, and went over the basics of the world they had recently come into.

First and foremost, each angel existed to watch over a human being. At the completion of their courses, they would be assigned theirs.

Second, it was forbidden for an angel to fall in love. It didn’t matter what kind of love it was, whether it was for their human, any human that their human interacted with, or any aspect of life on Earth. As they were later taught, it had only caused great suffering and grief among the population. Angels could never exist on Earth, and to long for a thing you will never have is a painful experience for not only the individual, but for every angel in existence. Angels were more than empathetic creatures; every emotion they felt was shared in full with everyone. That was how they were able to enforce the rule, because the moment an angel went astray and broke that rule, everyone instantly knew about it.

To love was to fall, and every angel feared falling. So they resolved never to love again. Most angels were able to live their life and comfortably say at the end of it that they never knew the sensation of falling a second time.

By the end of his, Mihashi would say that he experienced it too many times to count.

-

The human he was assigned was a boy.

The first time he laid eyes on him, Mihashi felt a nervous sort of excitement race through him like electricity. This was the human he was going to spend the rest of his life watching over; this was the beginning of everything! He fumbled the papers in his hands and looked carefully at the information on this human. His name was Abe Takaya, and he was a second year in high school. 16 years old and just now getting an angel? That was abnormal. Humans were usually assigned angels before they entered school. Mihashi shook his head very fast, like he could physically shake away the thoughts. It didn’t matter! He had one now, right? And if there was an issue it would probably become apparent pretty fast.

He tried not to think too much about that.

Having a problematic human wasn’t something you could do much about, you couldn’t be reassigned. An angel’s life is directly tied to its human’s. Abandoning your human would kill you; there were no ifs ands or buts about it. Angels only existed to bless humans, and they were taught that from the beginning; it wasn’t considered sad or a burden, but simply part of their lives. They would live only for their human, and when their human died, they would too. It was a life filled with purpose, but it was an uncertain one. If this Abe ended up being as problematic as he potentially presented himself to be well... Mihashi himself would be in danger.

But he couldn’t think like that already! He had just met this human, and to make assumptions about him before he had even observed five minutes of his life was ridiculous, and definitely not angelic.

So, he began his work.

It took a few weeks for Mihashi to get into the step of the progression of time on Earth, but once he did time seemed to fly by as he watched Abe’s life with utter fascination. Weeks turned into months, and he realized why there were some angels who couldn’t be torn away from their Earth screen. He had watched other angel’s humans for a short amount of time, but it had been boring to Mihashi. He was excited to get his own human, but he was also almost worried that he wouldn’t find it as interesting as the other angels. It was very different when the human was his.

It hadn’t taken very long before Mihashi was completely engrossed in Abe’s life. By the end of the first month, he no longer felt like a bystander, but an active participant. He knew Takaya, as he was referred to only by his parents, like the back of his hand.

He was a difficult, rude boy on the surface. And, well, on the inside too. But there was more to him. He really did care about the people around him to a degree; he just had an odd way of showing it. He didn’t get along very well with anyone and voluntarily isolated himself to avoid any troubles that could arise from people reacting badly to his personality. He didn’t have any friends at his high school, but had a few different people he could talk to if he needed. He didn’t talk much in class or at home, and spent most of his time (this was Mihashi’s absolute favorite part) playing baseball.

Angels didn’t have sports or any kind of recreational activity, really, because they didn’t need them. They were too busy for anything like that. So, Mihashi had never known that something like baseball existed.

He had been taken in immediately.

He couldn’t describe why it had caught his attention like it did, but it was just so interesting! Whenever Abe would go to his team’s practice, Mihashi would begin watching even closer than he had been previously. It was nothing like he had ever seen, nothing like he had ever experienced in his short life. He couldn’t follow the practices very well at first, but soon he had a vague sense of the rules. The game revolved around the small ball that the humans would throw and hit. There was a lot of running and yelling, a lot of smiling and frowning, and sometimes the humans would cry. They would sweat, something Mihashi had never experienced.

He wondered what it was like to sweat. He wondered if angels were even capable of sweating, or if there would be any angels who would like to try playing baseball with him.

Probably not.

Abe didn’t get along very well with his teammates. Looking through the paperwork that described his life up until Mihashi was assigned to him in detail, he read that when Abe entered the team, he hadn’t found a pitcher to motivate him. The team didn’t have a pitcher at all, actually, at least not one who was a pitcher before he was a first baseman. A boy who had never played baseball before ended up with their starting pitcher position, and Abe had quickly become frustrated. He didn’t quit the team, and didn’t slack off at practice or in games, but he had really hoped that someone would have challenged him to make his game even better, and he hadn’t found that at Nishiura. It was a story that made Mihashi feel very melancholic. There was nothing he could do about Abe’s past, unfortunately, but he wished that he could have been born a little sooner, or he had learned to fly a little faster. Maybe he would have been able to do something to help, anything. But that wasn’t how it was supposed to be apparently.

Three months in, one of Abe’s teammates, Hanai, hit a homerun in a game. Mihashi had impulsively sped into the air and flew around in a frenzy. With that one hit he brought Tajima and Suyama home! He scored three points for Nishiura! Mihashi’s face was flushed with excitement. It was the first time he’d seen something so incredible, and it was that moment that it hit him, hard.

He loved baseball.

He wanted to play baseball with all of them. He wanted to be someone who could challenge Abe, he wanted to run around those bases with them. Not just anyone, but THEM, the people he had been watching along with his human, all of them! He wanted to see up close the sweat running down their faces after a particularly intense practice. He wanted to experience everything with them, he wanted it all so much.

He had never felt anything this intensely before, and it almost scared him.

It really did scare him when he realized what it meant.

It wasn’t long before he was joined by many different angels who looked at him like he was disgusting. He was taken away from his screen, much to his despair, and taken to the head honchos of the angel world. They talked to him for a very long time about how dangerous it was for angels to love anything that came from the Earth, and how it could destroy their society if left unchecked.

Mihashi heard what they were saying, but he couldn’t listen to it.

How could something as wonderful as baseball, and loving it, be so bad? It was here that he remembered how terrible the whole emotion sharing business was, because they immediately knew his feelings on the matter.

“Do you really intend to defy the ways our society has run for generations?”

Mihashi shook his head, a cold fear seeping through him.

“Then you need to give up this foolishness,” a voice from the crowd of angry angels in front of him growled.

“At least it wasn’t a human he fell for,” another voice chimed in, sounding relieved.

“Yes, that is the upside to this whole fiasco. Any time it’s a human, it’s much harder on the angel to give up on it.”

“Ren,” a kinder voice spoke out. “Come now, we all know how hard you worked to get assigned your human. You took longer in your classes than others, but you obviously wanted to get to this point. Why throw away all that hard work? Just give up that emotion, and everything will be fine. You can go back to your screen and it’ll be like this whole thing never happened.”

The angels in front of him nodded, and waited for Mihashi’s response, whether it be verbal or emotional.

After a while, Mihashi spoke.

“But, I want to play baseball with them.” He spoke resolutely, no waver in his voice, his eyebrows set in determination. He didn’t want to give this up, no, he couldn’t give it up. You can only deny a need so long before it eats you away, and this was a pure, desperate need for him now. He couldn’t imagine a life as just an observer of the game; that wouldn’t be much of a life at all.

Mihashi knew that he would, on some level, be satisfied with being able to simply watch over Abe for the remainder of his life, but there was a whole new level that had opened up in his mind. On that level he couldn’t be satisfied with just that. He couldn’t even imagine how Abe felt while playing baseball, and that was something that would keep him from truly understanding and sympathizing with his life. How could he be a proper angel without that? How could he help Abe at all if he didn’t understand what Abe loved the most? If he didn’t love it just as much?

His feelings supplemented his words, and a sigh came from one of the angels.

“So you’ve made your decision.”

The next thing he knew, Mihashi was falling.


	2. Chapter 2

Waking up was never a pleasant thing, but Abe did it anyway.

He sometimes asked himself why he did it. He didn’t particularly care about his classes and got by on self-study. He supposed it was mainly for baseball, though lately he had a hard time remembering why he had been so passionate about it before. Their team was decent, but it was missing something so vital that they would never be able to grow without it. Abe himself would never grow without it either, and practicing without the hope of growing was borderline depressing. It felt like being with Haruna again, except, you know, without an actual pitcher being present.

Abe had really hoped that high school would have been an improvement, but so far it was much worse in comparison. Oki was trying his hardest, but he just wasn’t a starting pitcher. Getting hit because of Haruna’s shitty control was almost preferable since he could at least throw well when he could ass himself to do it.

Abe sighed and pushed himself up and ran a hand through his hair. Thinking about it wouldn’t change much, so instead he turned off his thoughts and let his body step into his daily routine. Wash face, brush teeth, get dressed; beat by beat he felt like he was watching his movements from outside of himself. His muscles remembered each movement well, and it felt almost comfortable. Nothing was out of place, this morning was just like the last. 

Well, except for that.

Abe stopped in his tracks as he passed by a window and his eyes caught something outside.

“What the..?” He mumbled quietly as his attention became focused on the crumpled form in front of his home. He made his way downstairs and stepped outside but stayed at a safe enough distance until he figured out what it was.

Waking up to a boy you’ve never seen before passed out in your yard is an interesting experience, Abe decided after some thought. Doubly so if said boy happens to have gigantic, obviously broken, white wings attached to his back.

“Hey…? You okay there?” He asked slowly while approaching the boy. He didn’t respond, so Abe squatted down next to him and poked his shoulder with a supremely uninterested look on his face.

“Yeah, uh, hey, wake up.” Abe shook him a little and felt the smaller boy begin to shift. His eyes fluttered open and brown eyes took in where he was as he sat up.

“Is this… Earth?” He asked quietly, voice colored with confusion.

Abe looked at him for a while and decided to ignore the question. Unless this guy was some kind of performer with excellent prop making skills, those wings were probably real, which would lead to this guy not being from around here.

“Does that hurt?” Abe gestured to his broken wing. The boy winced, as though him pointing it out had reminded him of his problem. He nodded a little and bit his lip, looking at Abe a little oddly.

Like he recognized him.

Abe decided to ignore that too.

“Come inside, I can look up how to help you out with that.” He pushed up from the ground and started walking towards his house without waiting to see if Mr. Wings followed. If he didn’t it was like Abe could force him, after all. When he reached the door and turned around, though, Mr. Wings was right behind him, looking nervous and just a little confused by everything. They could talk about that later, maybe.

Abe turned on his family’s computer to look up how to mend a wing. He figured that it wouldn’t be much different than helping a bird’s wing, just much larger in scale. He looked at the time while the computer was slowly starting up and sighed. He flipped open his phone and tapped out a quick message to Hanai that he would be late to practice this morning, sorry, and all that jazz. Mr. Wings hovered behind him uncertainly, hiding a little behind his good wing. Abe watched him out of the corner of his eye, looking him up and down.

“What’s your name?” The boy almost jumped out of his skin when Abe spoke up.

“Mihashi… my name is Mihashi Ren….” He stuttered out, voice sounding a little breathless. Abe nodded, confused but glad to hear that it was a relatively normal sounding name. Maybe he was just a performer after all… who felt pain from his fake wings. Ah. Right. Not likely. He shook his head a little and turned back to the computer.

After scrolling through a few different pages he had the general idea of what to do. He got up and started rummaging through their medicine cabinet. “You should sit down while I do this.” He called out absentmindedly to Mihashi and he immediately dropped to the floor, eyes wide and following his every move.

Abe grabbed a roll of medical tape (which they had plenty of stocked up seeing as they were a sports family) and headed back to Mihashi. ”Tell me if I’m wrapping it too tightly, okay?” He told the other sternly and started in on securing the wing against Mihashi’s body.

Minutes passed in silence. Mihashi would peek over his shoulder every now and then, his eyes darting back and forth and his mouth moving like he wanted to say something, but nothing came out of it. Under more normal circumstances Abe would be ready to strangle the kid, but something about the fact that he was mending a mysterious boy’s wing suspended his impatience for the moment, which was maybe even more miraculous than the winged boy himself.

“…Why can you see them?” Mihashi finally asked very quietly, his stutter still alive and well.

“Am I not supposed to?” Abe asked, his voice sounding far too calm to be coming from Abe Takaya.

Mihashi shook his head slowly. “I… I mean, not that we have much record of what happens when others have fallen to Earth… I think it’s uncommon at least….”

Fallen? Abe raised an eyebrow at that choice of words and wondered what they implied, but immediately decided that it was absolutely not his business. He might have many faults, but his one virtue was that he didn’t pry into other people’s lives. There was no point. If someone wanted to tell him about their lives, he’d let them. Unless he wasn’t interested, of course.

He finished off securing the wing and grunted in acceptance. “Does it feel too tight or anything?”

Mihashi shook he head very fast to the point that it almost looked like a blur. “No, Abe, it’s feels perfectly fine.” His face instantly fell into horror as Abe’s face simultaneously turned into one of suspicion.

“How did you know my name?”

Mihashi looked like he was about to flee the room so Abe grabbed his shoulder firmly and stared him down.

“Well… Well I mean,” Mihashi’s stutter was even worse than before as he tried to explain himself. “If it’s related to my wings… do I have to specify?” The horror in his voice showed him just how much Mihashi did not want to tell him. Abe’s face screwed up in disbelief for a moment before sighing and releasing his death grip on his shoulder.

“I guess you don’t.” He sighed and stepped back. “I guess if you were here to murder me or something you would have already done it. I won’t make you tell me for now. But I want answers eventually, okay?” Mihashi nodded slowly, looking relieved.

Abe frowned and closed his eyes. “I have to get to morning practice, but you can’t stay here while I’m gone. So unless you have somewhere else to go, I guess you’re coming with me.”

Mihashi’s eyes brightened immediately and he looked like he was about to crap his pants out of excitement. “Really? I can go to practice with you??”

Abe just shrugged. “It’s not as exciting as you apparently think it is. We should hurry, I’m already late.” He picked up his school bag and made sure he had everything with him before they headed out the door. They jumped on his bike, Mihashi sitting on the back and holding Abe’s shoulders lightly so he didn’t fall off. Double riding could get him in trouble, but it wasn’t like he had a second bike. The journey was completely silent and the only indication that Mihashi was still even there (besides his hands) was the aura of nervous excitement coming from behind Abe.

When they got close enough to the school to hear the rest of the team going through their morning exercises, Mihashi’s hands tightened painfully on Abe’s shoulders. Abe spat out a “hey, dude” in warning but Mihashi’s eyes were focused on where the noises were coming from, as though he were in a trance. ‘He must be a baseball nut,’ Abe thought to himself. He wondered vaguely if Mihashi was like how he used to be.

They locked up his bike and jogged to the field. Momoe heard them coming and met them at the gate. “It’s not like you to be late, Abe.” She said half in irritation and half in concern. It was at that point that she noticed Mihashi. She gestured at him in question, and Abe just shrugged.

First things first, though. “I’m sorry for being late.” He took off his hat and bowed a little before standing up straight and gesturing to the new boy with it. “This is Mihashi. He’s going to be with me for today. Is it alright if he sits in on practice?”

The coach was on top of Mihashi in a second, checking his muscles and looking him up and down in evaluation. “You’ve got some pretty good arm muscles kid. Want to try throwing a few balls with our guys?” She asked with a smile. Mihashi looked like he was about to explode, but just nodded instead.

“Could I? Am I allowed?” He asked, a strange fear clouding the joy that had made his stutter ten times worse, even Abe hadn’t thought that possible.

Momoe laughed. “Of course! If you’re any good we just might keep you.” She whispered slyly before creeping back to where Shinooka and Shiga were standing. Abe followed behind so that he could change into his practice uniform and Mihashi tagged along too. He was tripping every few steps because instead of watching where he was walking, he kept on turning his head to watch the others stretching and running around.

“Shinooka, do we have any spare practice uniforms?” Abe called out to the girl in sweats not too far away from them. She thought a second before nodding.

“Yep!” She eyed Mihashi and hummed. “I think it will fit him, but I’m not sure. I’ll go grab it though!” Abe thanked her as he pulled on his shirt. When he was done he started stretching.

“You’re sure about this?” Abe’s words sounded less like a question and more like he was trying to warn him off. Mihashi looked around and nodded in the calmest manner he’d done anything in in the past hour.

“Yeah. I really, really want to do this.” As Mihashi said that, Shinooka returned and handed the extra uniform to Abe. He in turn threw it towards Mihashi who almost fumbled it, but caught it in the end.

“Well, let’s do it then.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ohhhh my god I'm so sorry that this took so long to be posted. I knew I shouldn't have posted this two days before I left for a con. I lost my museeeeee but here I am I'm not giving up on this stupid au just yet.
> 
> quality may have dropped significantly from the first chapter because I was having a hard time from abe's pov but I thought that it needed to be from his for this chapter. will switch back to mihashi for the next chapter and probably the rest of the fic and hopefully the chapters will get better from there too. thanks for sticking with me!!


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